Abstract
According to Alvin Toffler's futurological theory, which is highly regarded especially in the United States, world history has proceeded in three waves. The agricultural wave began 8 to 10,000 years ago, it was followed by the industrialisation wave about 250 years ago, and now, after the Second World War, we have the third and currently final wave, which defines the continued existence of humanity not in terms of agriculture and animal husbandry or, after that, industrial production, but using knowledge as the main source of energy. There is the new information society, which owns the mode of our being-in-the-world today. It is not the proletariat (according to Marx) but the cognitariat that is dominant today. Minutely adjusted technologies are dismantling our mass democracy (and the previous mass media of radio and television above all); instead, we now live in a process of disempowerment because the new distribution systems tailor the content of communication to groups, individuals and particular cultures. According to Toffler, the increasing diversity of communication channels dissolves the human being as a mass. We no longer have to be afraid of Big Brother (as in Orwell's horror vision '1984'), but of the private sector, which can control and pass on the citizen's data via his communication and input processes.
